Inquiry: Learning Science by Doing Science

What Is Science?

Textbooks and the media often convey inaccurate portraits of scientists and what they do. Science can be viewed as a body of knowledge and as a way of building knowledge. It consists of asking questions about the natural and manmade worlds and looking for answers to those questions in a systematic and repeatable way. In general, scientists believe that questions about how the world works can be answered; scientific knowledge is subject to change; and knowledge gained from the study of one part of the world (or universe) can be applied to other parts.